Increasingly, services and communication are achieved over the Internet and the World-Wide Web (WWW). Geographical location is becoming irrelevant with respect to network connectivity. Furthermore, the physical devices used by individuals to communicate and conduct business are increasingly becoming transparent through machine virtualization techniques and miniaturized.
As the industry uses more and more virtualization, there exists a problem on how the changes made by the end user are saved and restored. The end user may start out with a standard virtual machine (VM) image but as soon as a new program is added, some programs are run or files are saved, the image must be saved as an entirely new image or the changes will be lost if the user ends and restarts the user's VM. A user can map a personal disk to the running VM image and use it for all changes and installs, but this does not solve the problem. The reason for this is that when software is installed or runs it is common for the software to write to the root/boot drive. Writing to the root drive changes the base image, such that the base image must now be saved as a new image. This entire process can consume large amounts of storage/disk and add a required step to the end user. The described situation also adds new ways to lose data, time, and disk space.
An example of this would be if the user installs a new application such as Word® to a mapped drive such as “N:” on a running instance of a VM such as “Standard_Win32_image.” Drive N: is mapped to a personal storage drive for the user; it could be a local drive, a network drive, or a cloud drive such as “S3” via Amazon®. As Word® is installed the code is copied to drive “N:,” which does not change the base image but as part of the install several files are also added or modified on the default ROOT. One of these files is the Window's® Registry. The Window's® Registry is a part of the “Standard_Win32_image” and is now changed by the user. After the install of Word® and as the user runs the Word® application, the registry continues to change as the user does any thing that Word® is configured to “remember.”
This example of using and installing Word® is just one simple case of how the VM image can be changed by the user and need to be saved as a new image. As the industry moves into a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), the problem of having many personal images will become a major storage and management problem.